Improving People Performance
better work place safety
[ The approach ]
Organisations have a legal and moral obligation to do all they can to promote workplace safety. Reducing injuries and lost-time accidents due to the “human factor” are constant management preoccupations.
And yet, for all sorts of reasons, even in hazardous environments workers, continue to take risks and shortcuts, despite safety initiative after safety initiative. Where initiatives have proved successful in the short term, compliance usually drops off again. Or a “safety plateau” is reached.
The true cost of poor safety is much higher than often thought. Of course, in the worst cases, it can have tragic personal costs.
But there are also huge potential costs that company management as well as safety managers need to recognise. For instance, in our experience some companies can lose millions of pounds a year in interrupted production, overtime, litigation and so on. And with increasing City and opinion-former focus on corporate and social responsibility, poor safety is a reputational risk.
Then there are the opportunity costs: organisations with a better safety record build a better strike rate in tendering and can defend prices and margins in competitive bidding.
At Quo, we have developed a behavioural approach to improving safety strategy and compliance, which has involved thinking creatively about how and why accidents happen. Importantly, our approach involves the practical application of behavioural science, to ensure that safety improvements are achieved and sustained, and make a clear contribution to the bottom line for the long-term, at a fraction of the cost of one of our programmes.
